Just like Emo

The Cure - Just Like Heaven



And, in the blue corner, weighing in at a grand total of 50 kilograms of hair resembling an old toothbrush, vintage lace, goth makeup and pre-emo emo-ness, ladies and gentlemen, hailing from Britain's conservative south: Robert Smith and The Cure!

In contrast to The Smiths, dour northerners that they are, The Cure are a flubber of camp gothiness, writing songs about holding your breath until you pass out (just a bit longer please, Robert, see if you can hit the magic 4 minutes which will give you irreversable brain damage), tigers and .. well, I've never cared enough to get past this song and Love Cats. This is strange, because the friends of mine who adore The Cure, dour northerners mostly but in this case from Johannesburg rather than Lancashire, are also the friends who introduced me to music like Nick Cave, who, despite or maybe because of his camp gothy pretentions, I've been a fan of ever since. Maybe it's because he's Australian.

Back to the song. It's in A major, not normally a particularly popular key, to be honest, but it does lend a happy, slightly jaunty air to the song. For the unitiated, major keys tend to sound more upbeat, while minor keys, where the 3rd, 6th and 7th notes of the scale being used are flattened, tend to sound sadder and sometimes even mournful. Needless to say, one expects The Cure to be more familiar with the minor chord view of life. One is sometimes suprised. The song was originally used, in instrumental form, as the title music to a French TV show, probably while Robert SMith was too sad to write lyrics to it. When he did, it was released to significant critical acclaim on the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me. The beginning is Pixies-like, with drum fills leading into spare, driving drumming, a single track of bass on top, followed by clean, slightly reverb-y guitar. Then the mournful vocal wails so typical of our Robert. He almost sounds happy.

The songs not bad actually - it may not be enough to make me buy the entire Cure ouevre for the purposes of revisitation, but I would contemplate borrowing it to have a quick listen. But I suppose that's verdict enough on the song - for me to admit to quite liking something that I had previous dismissed as music made by men who sit down to pee, is practically miraculous and symbolic, in a wider sense, of this quixotic quest to educate myself on what others consider great music. Maybe there is gold in them thar hills.

Verdict: Annoyingly decent. Not good maybe, but certainly not bad.

Tomorrow: Alice Cooper - I'm Eighteen